Brian Vidor favors the subtle taste of bamboo termites, but for those nights with the guys, he prefers stir-fried Taiwanese crickets. They go better with beer. He offers these insect delicacies and others at Typhoon, the restaurant he owns in Southern California's Santa Monica Airport.

Vidor was turned on to arthropod cuisine while working in Asia and Africa for 15 years as an animal broker, a job in which he shipped exotic animals to zoos all over the world. He laughs about the first time he bit into a bug, during a 1974 business trip to the African bush. The cooks worked beneath a lantern inside a tent while the other members of the expedition gathered outside to eat their meals in darkness. One night, Vidor, curious about his soup's crunchy top layer, turned on his flashlight. It seems that a variety of bugs—drawn to the cooks' lantern light—had dropped like flies into the broth. Vidor didn't mind. "It was good protein," he says.

The 53-year-old Vidor, who opened Typhoon in 1991, is not alone in his cravings for the creepy crawlies. Appetizers such a giant mountain ants from Manchuria and spicy fried scorpions from northern Thailand sell every night at the restaurant, along with the menu's more traditional Pan-Asian cuisine. Customers tend to be 20- and 30-somethings who are open to trying something new. "They may try it for a joke, although we take it very seriously," says Vidor. "Once they try it, no one's said they didn't like it."

Yeah, but did they ask for seconds?